Lollipop Leadership
Greetings from Ushuaia, Argentina! I flew down to meet our son Sam at the end of his bicycle journey from Prudoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia - 16,000 total miles riding a bike! Much more on that on another day.
I saw this YouTube short with Bill Murray where he recalls the story of meeting Bruce Willis after Willis had become a successful actor. When they met, Willis told Murray the story of how he and Gilda Radner treated him when he worked as a paige (a paige is an assistant or helper) on the set of Saturday Night Live when he was a young "nobody." One of Willis's jobs as a paige was to refill the bowls in the actor's rooms with M&M's and pretzels. Take a listen:
This triggered a similar powerful memory of mine. When I was just out of the Navy, I was trying to figure out a way to make money so I could live, buy a car, and eventually go to school. My big idea was to learn how to weld (yes, become a welder) since I figured they made a lot of money. So I signed up to go to a vocational training school in North Minneapolis to learn welding. It was a dilapidated place cobbled together for poor kids who were high-school dropouts like me.
Back in those days, there was no internet or computers, so communication was either by telephone or mail. I needed to send in a letter to request an application to take the GED high school equivalency diploma. There was a black woman, about 30 years old or so, who worked at the vocational school, who helped me figure out where to mail the letter to.
So I wrote the letter and showed it to her to see if it was ok (keep in mind that I was a dropout and had never done any real schoolwork, ever, so I had no writing skills whatsoever). I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. I was sitting in a chair alongside her industrial grey metal desk. I handed her my handwritten letter, and she unfolded it and, without moving at all, sat there silently reading it. Then, she raised her head, turned her face toward mine, and said:
"You can really write well."
Being a committed juvenile delinquent as a teen and an overall massive management problem, other kids tormented me for being a loser and stupid, and given the strong circumstantial evidence (nearly all F's for grades and in and out of jail and reform schools) that supported their observations, I had slowly internalized these things as beliefs.
Her comment - "you can really write well" was one of the first times that someone saw something in me that was good, and she told me, to my face. To this day, she is there in my mind as someone who gave me a tiny plot of mental land and who planted a small seed of my worth for it to grow over time. I will never forget her or that moment, just as Maya Angelou said.
The Bill Murray clip, combined with my personal memory, reminded me of this sensational 6-minute TED talk by Drew Dudley called "Leading with Lollipops."
Whether you call it Lollipop Leadership or Everyday Leadership, the principle is the same. We all have the opportunity to impact people in our daily interactions in either a positive or negative way, and either will lead to memories. The question is, what kind of memories do you want others to have of you?
If you think something nice about someone, say it! You might just change their life.
Feedback with a thumbs up or down is greatly appreciated, or drop an email to me michael@michaelmaddaus.com.
